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Imagine yourself as a brick and mortar shop owner. You have scoured the length and breadth of Milan, Paris and New York for the latest designer wear and swanky accessories and your store is stocked with the latest offerings, signature dresses, seasons’ couture, and chic accessories created by designers from around the world. People do come to your store, spend some time admiring your collection but don’t purchase anything. All you are left with is empty admirations.

Taking this analogy to an online setting, you may have a great website with quality content and people are visiting your website but you don’t see any rise in any form of action. It may be ‘download’, ‘buy’, ‘call’, every business wants to improve conversions.

We may be in any kind of online business, our ultimate goal is translating browsers into buyers. But with the bevy of distractions that the internet presents, all it takes is one click of the mouse to move from one website to another. So how do you survive in this attention economy? Call-to-action can help you grab the much-needed attention of your visitor and have the capacity to turn them into your buyers. They are perhaps the most important part of your website as they can drive users to take a desired action and help your website achieve your objectives. Check out the tips below to find out the best formulas for creating persuasive call to action.

Color Matters

Never make the mistake of downplaying with your call to action button. Avoid subtle colors like white, gray and black. You call to action needs to stand out and grab attention. It doesn’t have to clash with other elements of your web page but should be the first element which the user notices. Play with different colors and gradients to see which color button stand out the most.

Multiple CTAs

Gone are the days when only one CTA used to be the norm. Now you can add multiple CTA on one page but ensure that they don’t look crammed in and don’t compete with each other.

Location

The placement of CTA is very important. Add it in an obscure corner of your page and forget about conversions. Ideally the CTA should be the most prominent button on the page to receive maximum visual focus and attention. Typically the user’s attention moves horizontally before going down vertically suggesting that the strategic location should be headers, side-panels and footer. However, it is always best to test what works with your visitors and then place the CTA where it gains maximum attention.

Take the ‘You’ Approach

Instead of telling them what to do, tell them what they get. For instance, in case you want them to download your whitepaper, instead of using words like ‘download’ use words like ‘get insight on…’ The CTA should focus on the value it provides to the visitor instead of asking them for a certain action.

Action Oriented

The button copy should be simple, short, easy to understand, universal and placed just right. Use words that suggest actions and momentum. It also helps to create urgency in your visitors by using timing words like ‘limited time offer’, ‘now’, ‘today’.

With all the above tips, keep the tone positive and the button size sensible and clickable. Always test to see what works best for your landing page. Not all pages work the same way and what may seem to work for others may not work for you. The best solution is to keep analyzing and tweaking your efforts to optimize the CTA.

The brainchild of Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg, WordPress is probably an undisputed superstar of the blogosphere. One of the easiest and simplest content management systems, WordPress is perfect for running a blog or a website or a combination of the two. As WordPress is browser-based, the site or the blog can be managed from anywhere. Adding content is also a piece of cake for WordPress users. No technical knowledge of HTML or FTP is required and anyone with an idea and an internet connection can create a blog.

With the rise to superstardom, security risks and loss of privacy come with the territory. Hackers and plagiarists flood the internet everyday looking for security vulnerabilities. If your blog is found vulnerable, anything from a virus injection to redirecting traffic to another site can be done. Although your blog may look like secured from outside, a small breach can have a domino effect and all your work may go down the drain. There are ways through which you can improve the security of your blog to make it less vulnerable to hackers’ attacks. Read on to know more:

Keep your WordPress site and plugins up-to-date

The best practice is to keep your WordPress themes, plugins and versions updated. It will not only keep your website secure from hackers and free from outdated software, the improved features, functionality and tools will allow your users to get more and ensure a high performing website with quicker functions and easier navigation.

Use strong passwords

There are some hackers’ software which can attempt up to 350 billion guesses per second for your passwords. This mind-boggling number is only believed to increase in future. Therefore it is critical to keep your passwords strong. Never use the same password twice and never share your passwords or share it through email or write it down. While handling your website on a public site, never save password or use ‘remember me’ option.

Keep your computer free of viruses and malware

If your personal computer is infected with virus or malware, chances of a hacker gaining access to your login details increases. Always keep your PC and laptops free of virus and malware with a good anti-virus program.

Limit access to WordPress Admin Area

It is essential to limit the access to WordPress to only a few people and even few IP addresses that way WordPress can limit the number of wrong log-in attempt to your website.

Consider multi factor authentication

Multifactor authentication blends two or more independent credentials creating a defensive layer and making it more difficult for an unauthorized person to log in. Even if one factor gets compromised, the attacker has one more barrier to cross before the website’s security is hacked. Enabling multi-factor authentication can considerably improve the website security.

FTP

While connecting FTP to FTP server, it is the best practice to use SFTP as using secured version of FTP can give another layer of protection to the website.

Ensure that your site is hosted on a reputed hosting Provider

Your WordPress website or blog is as secured as your hosting account. If your hosting platform can be compromised so can your blog or website. Choose a reputed Hosting provider with SSL certificate. Look for support for latest PHP and MySQL versions, firewalls, intrusion detection services among others.

Netrouting is committed to fulfil the mission critical IT demands for our Web Hosting platform using the best hardware available, spread over multiple data centers to ensure the quality and availability of your blog and website. Netrouting utilizes a Cloud based infrastructure for offering its Web Hosting service. Redundant storage, daily backups and automated fail over is included with all of our packages.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever!” This illustrious phrase of Keats’ is truer than ever especially when it comes to designs. The internet has transformed from a drab and colourless domain into a more exciting, vivid, and colourful virtual world. Going old-school and leaving your website boring and lacklustre won’t cut in today’s world. In this fast-paced world, there is no room for a drab website and if your website doesn’t look and act good, chances are, it will rank low in search engine’s result.

A website is a manifestation of an organization and leave a lasting impression in the minds of a viewer. Your website is an extension of your business and it should reflect your business persona. Deciding on a revamp is easy but selecting a perfect theme can be a concern as a good theme determines the future of your website. The choice of a theme will reflect on your business and that can be overwhelming. A commitment to a theme is a huge commitment as you need to stick together for a while and the pressure to pick a right one can be mind-wracking. Picking a right WordPress theme for your website involve much more than picking the latest fad or picking the coolest looking website. Check out the tips provided below to see how you can pick the best WordPress theme for your website.

Define Your Needs

When you are browsing for theme, it is very easy to get lured by the pretty themes out there and choose based solely on the ‘look’ aspect. However choosing a theme not aligned with your business will stand out like sore thumb and will be counter-productive. Before you embark on your WordPress theme selection, you need to ask yourself few questions and only after you have satisfactorily answered them, you can charge ahead and pick the best theme. Look in to see what your business goals are and what kind of WordPress theme would match with that. Research your competitors and check out what themes they are using. What kind of theme would be user-friendly for your audience? What kind of content is required for your business and what kind of theme goes well with the kind of content you have? Spend some time digging deep into your business and choose a theme that fits your business instead of making your business fit to the theme.

Pick a Theme that Relates to Your Industry

You may want to stand out from your competitors and wouldn’t want to be the part of the herd but when it comes to website themes, it is always advisable to stick to a theme relating to your industry, niche, services or products. For instance, if you have ‘wedding planning business’, it is always better to go with an image-based theme so that at the outset itself a visitor can understand what kind of business you are in.

Look for Versatility

Check if your website theme is scalable and can cater to your need for mobile, tablets and other sites without having to write too much codes.

Strive for simplicity

Complex themes look attractive but may not be very good in functionality. Complex themes with a lot going on may also have speed and redundant code structure issues. It is always suggested to go for simple themes as they are much easier to modify and are also compatible with many browsers.

Page Layouts

Check out how the different pages of the theme will look like especially if you have different content for different pages. Find out whether you can easily edit the columns and sidebars for different pages without modifying the theme.

Plugins

Plugins…plugins… everywhere! There are a lot of plugins available and you need to ensure that whatever plugins you need are available and compatible with the chosen theme. More often than not, many themes come with only few essential plugins and for rest of the plugins, you have to purchase and install them separately. Knowing what kind of plugins you would require will help you choose a suitable theme.

Browser Compatibility

Ensure that whatever theme you choose are browser compatible for most browsers. Some people forgo the less popular browsers like IE in favour of newer browsers. However, there are a lot of people still using IE. Look for the themes which are be w3 valid and cross browser compatible to cover all grounds.

Apart from these, speed, security, responsiveness, SEO compatibility are other concerns you need to look into closely when choosing your WordPress theme. With literally a lot of themes to choose from, it helps to know exactly what you need. Fulfilling all these criteria may seem ambitious but it all boils down to quality. With these recommendations, you can easily pick a good theme ideal for your business.

The next step after you have chosen a WordPress theme is to decide on the best hosting provider for your website. If you are on a lookout for hosting services, we have got you covered. The packages offered by Netrouting are perfect for both the starting webmaster and the experienced web developer. Our competitive pricing, free site builder and automated installation scripts for applications such as WordPress, Joomla and Magento will make your Web Hosting experience with us pleasant and time/cost saving.

Do you have state-of the-art computers, with best servers and cutting-edge tools, but still use the plain HTML to update the text of your website? You might be doing yourself a disservice. One of the best investments which you could make for your website and your business is investment in a content management system. Your website is the cornerstone and forefront of your business and you cannot take chances with it. Imagine a scenario where you need to update many things simultaneously on your website, it will be a difficult feat through traditional medium but a piece of cake for content management system.

In simple terms, Content Management System is a web-development tool within framework that lets you create, edit and update content with minimum or no programming skills. With a little bit of computer skills, like the knowledge of word processing programmes, a person can easily operate a content management system

The website is your main medium of communication with your customers and you need to ensure that the communication is timely and relevant. If you are bogged down by the technical details, you will not be able to put your best foot forward. A content management system combines power with simplicity, so you have the best of both world. Here’s a little smattering on the importance of content management system:

Easy for non-technical person – As stated earlier, a person with minimum computer knowledge of word processing programmes can easily learn and operate most Content Management Systems. It is especially important when it comes to adding new content as any writer without technical skills could handle CMS with no trouble. Since, all users don’t have the same kind of comfort level with technology, it is difficult for people to grasp complicated programmes. With CMS, businesses don’t have to spend time training the new users as most CMS can be learnt in minutes, if not seconds, saving the businesses time and money which would otherwise would have been wasted training the new users.

It allows multiple users and simultaneous update – A Content Management System allows multiple users and simultaneous updates which is important if you have a content based website. A CMS allows managing and publishing authorisations thus allowing multiple people to work on the website without worrying about the overrides. Many CMS also allow content to go live on a stipulated time period set by you.

Easy site maintenance –The site management and maintenance is truly easy with CMS. Before CMS, if you needed to change any page or sitemap, you would have to trawl through all the pages, making changes on each to ensure that it appears fine on the website. But with CMS, all you need to do is go through components of the CMS and with a click of mouse, you can make the changes, without breaking the architecture of the website. With CMS, you can changes pages, designs, site-map, etc, without worrying about the adverse effect on the website.

Easier to Update – Before CMS, you would have to remember to update the website, but most CMS of today, provide alert facility wherein, alerts could be sent to editors when content needs to be updated, removed or reviewed. This keeps the website current and in good shape and prevent old data from presenting to the website viewers. CMS also reduces the publishing time, letting you broadcast content faster. One more advantage of easy usage of CMS is that you are most likely to publish more content simply because it is so easy to update.

Easy to manage content and workflow management – A decent CMS provides a workflow management system wherein content have glance view with the status of pages, whether it is live, being reviewed or kept in a draft. With this facility, it is easier to integrate a system with different authority to various people. For instance, you may want to review the content edited by a new-employee for a month. With CMS, you could provide edit-only authority to the person and live it yourself after reviewing the content. It is also easy to integrate content with the overall plan so that all your integrated efforts like marketing, content, etc. come together to create a brand presence.

Search engine-friendly – A content management system helps to optimize a website making it easier for search engine to crawl to your pages so that users can find the information effortlessly. Most CMS also allows the insertion of keywords and incorporation of other SEO practices like page titles, proper metadata, correct URLs, etc. into the website. With CMS, the website also loads faster.

Consistency in Design and Content – Since, CMS provides a suite of templates for editors, which can be used for different pages of the website, there is a consistency in design and content. When a template is edited for colour, designs and structure, it can be reflected to the whole website with a click of the mouse. With so many different options, it is easy to give a unique identity to each page while keeping the same structure and ‘voice’ of the website.

Archive capabilities – One of the most important functionalities which a CMS provides is archive capabilities. You can archive old content and may re-use it later if required. Unlike the old times, where you had to delete or remove the old content to add in the new content, CMS allows you to archive the non-relevant content..

More power to you! – CMS saves you two most previous things – time and money! It also gives you independence to update, edit, and delete content on your own. What more, it helps in accelerating development time, reducing build time as well as reducing the cost of keeping the website updated.

The importance of having a content management system for a website can never be stressed enough especially when it comes to commercial websites. From bespoke designs, easy to add content features, extensive functionality and affordability, a CMS is an ideal solution for most corporations. Invest in a content management system now, if you haven’t already done so!

Netrouting’s hosting solutions caters to webmasters who wants to use the full benefits of a content management system without any need to invest time in setting up the environment. We make this easy for you by providing one-click scripts that can spin up popular CMS like wordpress, joomla and magento in a matter of minutes.

The idiom ‘Variety is the spice of life’ has taken a literal meaning in today’s turbo-charged world. The wealth of choices we are faced with in current consumer world has made users fickle and impatient. Today’s users are constantly connected to internet and this continuous connection has only added to the impatience of a user. In the Internet era, there is no such thing as brand loyalty. Or to put it more aptly, the loyalty is to the quality now. Users are increasingly demanding high quality experience and the only way a business can capture a user’s attention is by delivering a seamless, consistent experience to its users.

A fast and better performing websites invariably translate to better user engagement, frequent site visits and improved revenues. Another reason why you should strive for a high performing fast website is that these websites are indexed faster by search engines and may appear higher in rank, giving you a competitive edge over others. Learn more on how to improve your website’s performance and optimize it for best usage:

Caching

Caching in simple terms can be defined as the temporary local storage place for online content, including text, images and videos. It is one of the best ways to improve a page performance. Make use of browser caching by leveraging headers like “cache-control” for dynamic components and “never expire policy” for static assets.

Rendering Performance

It is very noticeable if the applications and sites do not run properly, therefore optimizing the rendering performance is very important. Optimizing the critical rendering path ensures that there is a significant improvement in the time to render pages. Understanding the critical rendering path better also helps in creating interactive applications for users. Some ways through which you can ensure optimization is by avoiding complex layout and outline thrashing and streamlining paint complexity.

Optimizing Content Efficiency

In order to optimize the website, it is very important to leverage and optimize each byte including the content. Ensure that your content is optimized to improve the efficiency of your website.

Optimizing Images

Images occupy a substantial volume of optical space and account for most of the downloads from the websites. Optimizing images can result in drastic performance improvements. It can even reduce operational costs by decreasing storage space requirement and reduced hosting costs. Do a careful analysis of the requirement of optimal settings for your images and optimize them for best performance.

Compress Images and Texts

The website is made up of so many components and many of them like images and content can be compressed to optimize a website. It helps in saving storage space and decreasing load time. There are many websites which specialize in providing page tests letting you know the best objects from your site which can be compressed and also optimize the website for you.

Netrouting is a forerunner in providing CDN based solutions. It offers CDN based solution for multi-location content serving as well as bespoke E-commerce environments such as Magento with Nginx/Varnish Driven setups. Backed by a team of specialists, Netrouting enables a seamless internet experience by distributing content to end users with low internet latency, reducing processing overhead, optimized and secure content, improved performance and maximized return on investment. Providing high quality web, virtual, colocated and dedicated hosting services with a efficient, seamless 24/7 customer support, Netrouting acts as your global internet backbone.

Similar to how a relatively clean home requires less time in cleaning, a clean and organized website needs less time in loading. Optimizing a website in today’s world is fundamental as a web performance is an essential part of a user experience, avoiding which can be detrimental to one’s business.

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